Twennytoo Five Hundo
In future year AD2022 I apparently logged 500 video games (mostly just played, not finished - can you even imagine). Am I proud of it? Of course not, brother, pride is a sin. Here they are in their entirety in order of play:
500 Games
Really tough in parts, but still a really cool game. Honorary Amemiyacore.
Gunstar Heroes but harder. There's a bunch of points in this where it feels like there is exactly one and only one way you can not take damage, so it can be pretty frustrating.
Metal Slug-ish, but before Metal Slug, by the folk who would make Metal Slug. Covering a wider arc because of your dual guns is cool!
Metal Slug-ish. Not as good as any of those but still okay!
This is what I wish wizards in movies and stuff were like. Just firing huge amounts of magic shit at everyone constantly. Doing a highest level Dragon's Dogma spell 50 times a minute. ZAP
Oh jeez, I played this last week and it's completely left my head already.
The essence of the arcade game. You're on a hoverboard, you punch stuff. It's good.
Kind of cool, but just a little too annoying for me.
Chills when they hit "of the HIGHEST POWERS"
Pretty much the same deal as RayCrisis for me. Decent, but if I was going to go back to a polygonal shmup it'd be Radiant Silvergun over any of these.
More bog-standard stuff.
Has the same problem of being visually unremarkable that 3 has, but I was actually able to finish this one, so that means it's great, excellent, etc.
Gave up on this pretty quickly, just not very good.
A very basic 3D beatemup, but you can smash enemies into tons of stuff or smash enemies with tons of stuff, so that's good. I like the main guy's brown leather jacket/red gloves combo!
Uses the Her Story framework to show us FMVs of I assume the developers and their mates filming in their grandparents' clothes. The video is endearingly amateurish but the actual playing had me eventually just getting lucky with random keywords more than following the threads to their conclusion. Maybe it's easier in French.
You walk around in eight directions and you shoot stuff, but it's worse now.
You walk around in eight directions and you shoot stuff. Sometimes that's all you need!
Looks and sounds great and I love Pulseman's look and concept but it's not much cope otherwise.
Tried this out because I thought the combat would be enough to see me through, but it's not really that good and it would have to be very good to help me power through all this Latest Anime Season guff.
Not much here. Platformer with some rules quirks that you can finish in one quick sitting. Again, one you play once and never go back to, but that's fine.
Good game. "Mood" stuff is usually thin gruel to me but taking photos of stuff is fun and this gives you a lot of options for taking photos, so I like it. Good soundtrack, good look. The first level of the DLC openly lifts from Johnny Mnemonic, so is very cool.
A game you need a pencil and paper for. Or a pen. Just something that writes, really.
Replay. Solid management game, had no idea there was a sequel until recently but I'll need to play it.
Some decent moments to build up the tension in this, and the subject matter is mildly interesting, but there's not really much else to say about it. It does get a bit on the nose with the "CIA bad" message at points, but well, yeah, they are bad, sure!
Impossibly fast. Possibly made to see how much the NES can't handle? If there's anyone out there who has 1CC'd this they should be preserved in a museum.
You walk along a perfectly straight level and then you fight a boss. Way too long for how simplistic it is, but you do have way more moves than I would expect.
Probably the best of the bunch overall that I'd played on PC-Engine up to this point.
It took me a bit to realise how you actually speed up, and then when I did I found I was either trying to win the race or trying to shoot stuff but trying to do both wasn't really working out. Interesting experiment but I'm not in a hurry to replay it.
Didn't get anywhere near finishing it, but it did seem really cool. I need to play it more.
I don't think it's as great as the first game, but it's still very good! Though it's driving me mental that the first uses "and" but this uses "&" on here.
Just not that engaging after playing a bunch of games that were the same thing but better.
Did not feel good at all to control, so I dropped it pretty early on.
Another one that I think I need to go through again to really click with.
I think I'd like this more if it was less about the lock-on. Sometimes I just want to shoot what's directly in front of me.
Not much to say about this one beyond flying cars being cool.
Darius Gaiden's little brother. Great atmosphere and boss designs makes up for slightly subpar gameplay.
Weird that this exists but I think Capcom should do more daft things like it. I cannot forgive how they made Vega look in this, though.
The tank controls just suck all the air out of this one - player mobility sucks and enemy mobility does not. Wakle Skade is a very funny name for a protagonist though.
It was good, but it's possible that Gaiden has ruined me for the rest of this series.
Finally, a SotN clone that includes one of the most important aspects of SotN: the Alucard Strut. Look at that walk animation! Hell yeah!
Short and sweet, it's a little on the easier side but you could do a lot worse.
Short and sweet, it's a little on the easier side but you could do a lot worse.
When you're sufficiently powered up in this one, anything flying up close behind you gets annihilated by engine wash. I think more shmups should do this.
Pretty bad, but I at least appreciate any game that has Hiroshi Hase in it.
Understandably similar to the sequel. Love that box art.
All I remember is that it was a mech game. I finished it, so it must have been decent!
Pretty standard shmup but with all kinds of weird cyberspace environments and enemies, it's really cool. The cutscenes where the main character enters cyberspace are the good stuff. The final boss of this game is Cyber-Hitler's skull, which has skeletal spider legs.
I'd probably be interested in checking out some of the later Gradius games, but this one didn't do much for me.
Can't really remember it, just know I didn't finish it.
The first cutscene was taking too long to load so I skipped it, and then the second cutscene loaded straight away and I was like oh, this is a porn game isn't it. Well, they made a pretty okay shmup when they probably could have gotten away with a lot less effort, so well done!
Mainly played this port to hear the music. Sadly not as good as I was hoping, but this version also has a bunch of low-rent cutscenes where the Brothers Lee are Kenshiro clones with turn of the 90s anime hair. Dope.
Extremely short game apparently made for a game dev contest? Well, it's cool anyway!
I remember this being fairly basic but fun. A lot of these PC-Engine games have good music that is totally overpowered by loud, bad SFX.
A brawler that has a pretty extensive movelist for a two-button controller, but sadly this doesn't stop it being janky and dull.
Still playing this, it's pretty cool! Obviously doesn't have the budget and weight of even the GBA Ace Attorneys behind it but the total devotion to the hard boiled clichés is very endearing. I like how much of it is just down to legwork. So far I think I would play a bunch more of these.
A better game than Lords of Thunder despite coming first.
Another great OST. Game is extremely hard, though.
The start of a run of PC-Engine/CD games I decided to play. Pretty rough and unpolished but it looks cool and the soundtrack is awesome.
Replay. Originally played it on PS5, finally grabbed it on PC so I have all the levels from 1 and 2 as well. The whole trilogy is just really good - I'm glad they shifted towards a more spy thriller-like world. Also some of the funniest games released in the last few years; every time Tobias Rieper speaks at length I crack up.
Completely badass game. I had to remap my controls a fair bit, I wonder what it's like on an N64 pad. Play this.
Fantastic animation ruined by physics and controls unchanged from the 80s. I've no idea why folk bother doing stuff like this.
Obviously took a ton of work to get it looking and sounding like it does, but I don't think the gameplay is very exciting. It never feels like I'm doing anything to bosses, either - even with damage modifiers it seemed like they would enter their next phase at a predetermined point. Gimme a healthbar at least!
Okay, by this point I'd played a bunch that were better so it didn't do that much for me.
Barely out of the tutorial. Need to get back to it.
Fine I guess, but it can be really hard to make out what's actually going on in these polygonal ones.
Ultraman shmup where you play as a ship from one of the many Science Patrols, which makes sense. It has all the Ultra fanservice you could want but it's not very good beyond that.
Not really that great but not terrible. Whenever Banpresto strays away from SRW into other genres it always seems to just be not quite as good as you want it to be.
Very weird e-mail themed shmup? Not really that great but worth a look for the unique theme.
Another good DoDonPachi. No really, I love that big laser!
Game was fine, but the thing that stuck with me the most was the music.
I don't think I really got this one. Might need to replay.
Replay. Still really impressive even now! I like how much of it feels like an actual investigation rather than you solving a series of video game puzzles. I did not get a good ending.
Wanted to replay the Blade Runner game after watching some Trancers and gave this a go. Decided it just looked a bit too weird at higher res/framerate and dropped it to go back to the original.
Replay. I've been dipping in and out all year, only at this point that I decided to actually log it. This game is always going to hold a very special place in my heart, even if I've done pretty much all I want to do in it.
Kinda-sorta wearing a management game skin, but really this is a choose your own adventure book. I got the best ending though, so hooray!
DIdn't really care for the style and the forced walking segments are a totally nonsensical addition, but there are some good boss fights here even if they run out of steam towards the end (final boss is really shitty). Don't know if it was just my control setup or what but I felt like I was fighting against an auto-aim a lot of the time in the ranged parts.
Another shmup I am never, ever going to 1CC.
Gave this a go because I've been interested in seeing the Tsui Hark film. Not really all that much to it and environments felt quite drab to me. Worse ways to spend the time though.
Tiny indie platformer that had been sitting in my Steam library for ages and could be finished in no time, so I threw it on. One of those you play once and never again, but neat idea.
What a game. Max Payne's Pro Skater. When you hit your groove and are actually doing well, you feel like the coolest motherfucker in the world. Very good idea to rip off Rollerball wholesale, because Rollerball is definitely cool in concept, but is mostly pretty boring outside of the actual match scenes. Very glad I played this!
Again, didn't like it as much as ESP Ra.De., but it's still good!
Decent enough indie shmup, although it doesn't really have much visual personality.
Hilariously edgy and kind of janky but it has that same fun quality of a Hotline Miami where positioning, prioritisation and full use of all your tools pays off big. Also very satisfying in its scrambliness when you don't do any of those and are just using everything around you on the fly.
Replay. There can be no justice in the world as long as this is stuck on the Wii of all things. No idea why it was exclusive in the first place.
I like to catch Pokemon and also evolve them. Held together by spit and hope, but it was pretty fun!
Replay technically, although last time round I only got as far as the first time you're actually able to move about and said fuck this. A lot of my friends hold this game in very high regard so I'm giving it another go, but went and did other stuff immediately after finishing the first chapter. I'll keep trying but Suda has yet to make a game I've enjoyed.
Replay. This isn't a good release, but the core gameplay of VF5FS is great, so if you have no other access to FS you should get this. Can't say enough good things about Veef.
Okay idea but I don't think EDF gameplay needed streamlining. Also pretty racist!
Replay. Mate asked me to play it over Fightcade with him so I obliged. Never been a fan. Great character art though, bring back giant shoulderpads Jill Valentine.
It's fine. I don't like that title though.
I liked ESP Ra.De. enough to buy this. Some tweaks, more content, fine by me!
By this point I'd played a lot of shmups and I think this is the first one where I really wondered how anyone could 1CC it. Wild!
A triumph. It was super hard and reading up on how the difficulty works made me do a big laugh with zero humour in it, but that's completely secondary to the music and the visuals here for me. A game I really, really wish I had played at the time because I would never have seen or heard anything like it. Maybe I'd be a completely different person now. That's the power I think Darius Gaiden might hold!
Can't really remember anything of it, but I feel like I should.
I'm even worse at horizontal shooters, but this is still cool. Tons of personality.
Another good Cave game. It's no Ketsui, though!
VERY COOL. This is one that I'm absolutely going to keep coming back to. Just relentless, I love how the proximity gimmick means that against bosses it feels like you're mashing up against each other and trying to force each other down. Great.
Pretty good from what I remember!
Okay I don't remember this one.
Every ship just being a flying gun is incredible, but I didn't much like it beyond that, partner.
This shifted between regular respawning and moving back to checkpoints on death, which was very annoying!
Just okay. By this point I'd definitely cemented that I preferred Cave to Psikyo.
4 Comments
Damn this is impressive
Did you complete Ring Fit?!
@Vee this took me days lol
@Dalaamclouds that's not the word I'd use but thank you!
@letshugbro good lord no. new years resolution though!
@Dalaamclouds that's not the word I'd use but thank you!
@letshugbro good lord no. new years resolution though!
Vee
1 year ago
Bayou Billy is one of the most unfun NES games I ever played, goddamn what a slog-filled and mean-spirited game.